Are kids the biggest casualty for both sides in the current Israel-Gaza conflict?

Following are excerpts from a Huffington Post blog by Jerome Karabel, a professor of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley:

Imagine that you are a parent (as I am) and that your children are caught in a war zone, facing the prospect of death or maiming at any moment. What do you do? The answer is obvious: you remove your children from the war zone as quickly as is humanly possible.

But if you are a parent in Gaza, where hundreds of children have died in the current conflict and over 2,000 have been injured, you have absolutely nowhere to go, with the borders sealed by Israel and Egypt and escape by sea or air impossible. You are trapped and unable to carry out the most elemental responsibility of parenthood: to protect your child. This is the true meaning of terror.

You have tried, of course, to do what parents do: to keep your child as safe as circumstances permit. But the task has proved impossible. You have rushed your family to sites such as the United Nations schools officially designated as safe havens, but they have been repeatedly attacked. The United Nations has reported at least six such attacks over the past two weeks, and many children have died as a result. There is nothing on earth you want more than to protect your children from harm, but you have nowhere to hide.

BEERSHEBA, ISRAEL – NOVEMBER 20: (ISRAEL OUT) An Israeli girl stands outside her house after it was hit by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip on November 20, 2012 in Beersheba, Israel. (Photo by Uriel Sinai/Getty Images)

Israelis, too, feel a sense of terror. They are frightened of the Hamas rockets now capable of reaching two-thirds of Israel’s population and they are terrified of the tunnels that now reach into Israel proper. The situation, however, is not the same as in Gaza; Israelis have an expensive “Iron Dome” that intercepts many of the rockets launched by Hamas, an elaborate warning system, and an extensive system of shelters. But the most fundamental difference is that Israelis who find the situation too dangerous can leave with their children and take them out of the country.

The world has become accustomed to fighting between Israel and the Palestinians, and there has been a cumulative desensitization to the human suffering caused by the current conflict. The magnitude of the humanitarian disaster now unfolding is immense. Gaza has fewer than 1.8 million inhabitants, and over 1,400 of them are now dead. Were a similar catastrophe to occur in the United States, a nation of 316 million people, the equivalent number of deaths would be over 240,000. This is more than double the total number of deaths — 101,890 — suffered in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Or, to put it another way, in number of deaths per capita, it is 9/11 80 times over.

The response of the international community reveals a growing sentiment that Israel has lost its moral bearings. Ban Ki-moon, the normally mild-mannered UN Secretary General, described the recent attacks on a school in Gaza being used to shelter families desperately attempting to find a safe haven as “outrageous and unjustifiable,” adding that “Nothing is more shameful than attacking sleeping children.” And Pierre Krähenbühl, commissioner-general of the UN agency for Palestine refugees, described the attack as “an affront to all of us” and “a serious violation of international law by Israeli forces.” “Today,” Krähenbühl declared, “the world stands disgraced.”

Faced with the unending possibility of attack, Israel is understandably concerned about its security. But its actions in the current conflict suggest that in the end its greatest threat may be to its soul.

Meta

Thank you, Palm Beach Post, for finally raising this issue. The press in Israel refuses to even report the casualties of children. The sole exception is the human rights organization, B'Tselem, which has listed the names of all these dead kids on its website. The reaction? They have received numerous death threats, they are being hounded and harassed, and the government is revoking their status! Shame on the Israel-can-do-nowrong crowd here in the US who try to absolve Netanyahu of his grotesque moral crimes!

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